I have two fixed mobile broadband solutions doing kind of the same thing. I have set a keep alive ping to every one secondon both units just to keep the units from stalling (and then automatically restarting themselves). But this consumes a lot of data just to keep alive.

Both units are permanently connected via vpn to wellington. I realise 2degrees have no obligation to support my set up, but would be good if it was something wrong on the 2degrees side and was fixable.

Fyi vodafone and Telecom are fine. I actually am about to cancel one of my vodafone mobile broadband connections that was for unit 2.

As Salty says please can you PM me with as much detail as possible so we can escalate any issue to the appropriate team.

Please include the following info -

* Your 2degrees number * Your location when the fault is experienced - town & street address would be great, also indoor/outdoors * Date, time & frequency of the issue * Device model and firmware revision * If you are on our roaming network (should show G or 3G on screen)

I can concur with some of the above posters.I too have been finding that running a continuous ping on my laptop (inbuilt 3g modem, various parts of chch, not moving while using data) does keep the data session "up" for longer. Without the ping i find more than once an hour suddenly data just "stops". No dns, existing tcp sessions are killed. Have to disconnect and reconnect the 3g data session (new ip?) and back up and running.

I have been streaming a us radio station over 3g to my phone for most of this morning, with no problems/interruptions. (newmarket, auck)

I have found in the past that the defult APN settings served up by the sim have been the cause of nearly all my connection problems. When i update the rom on my phone, the first thing i do is to delete the APN's & create new ones based on the settings in the 2 degrees forum. Then i don't seam to have any problems.

munchkin: ?Perhaps the connection timeout is set to a much lower value that the other providers?

Activity will definitely keep it from being idled out. But the idle timer is 2 hours, so it's not too aggressive. I would have thought normal laptop (or smartphone, for that matter) app chattiness would be enough to save you from a 2 hour timeout, but it sounds to me like that's what you're experiencing. If so, simply restarting the session will work. You won't need the more extreme measures others are reporting.

As Publius says above, I find if I don't keep a PING session going in the background, the connection can, and often does, just 'stop', and this can happen several times an hour. The connection will resume eventually, but I'll have a new IP, which can make things annoying.

In the past when I've experienced this problem I've found that it rarely rights itself that quickly, but will usually come back to life after 10 - 30 minutes or so. Of course, if it dies when you're right in the middle of doing something then you tend to power cycle the device to get it back rather than tossing it aside and coming back to it later.